A lengthy boycott of devolved government in Northern Ireland will stretch into 2024 after talks to end the impasse stalled on Tuesday, with frustration mounting over political dysfunction and crumbling public services.
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The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) withdrew from the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont in February 2022, forcing its mothballing because of post-Brexit trading rules it said undermined the region’s place in the wider United Kingdom.
But the resultant cuts in central funding from London have led to a decay in vital everyday public services such as hospitals, road maintenance and education.
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Rolling strikes during the year by public transport staff, nurses and teachers demanding long-held-up pay increases have fuelled growing discontent, with potentially more walkouts to come in January. Anger over the impasse is acute at hospitals in the province, where waiting times for treatment and surgery are the longest in the country.
The DUP’s political foes, including the largest pro-Ireland nationalist party Sinn Fein, have heaped pressure on the party to return to Stormont.
On Tuesday U.K. Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris, responsible for setting budget allocations for public services, offered the main parties a “final” package of £3.3 billion on condition that the executive is restored.
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But ruling out a deal before Christmas, the DUP said the financial offer was still not enough to end its boycott and that talks on post-Brexit trading arrangements were not yet finalised.
Unionist hardliners insist the so-called “Windsor Framework” negotiated between London and Brussels leaves in place a de facto border in the Irish Sea at the behest of EU law.
Only the removal of the “internal frontier” can clear the path for a return to the Stormont executive, a group linked to pro-U.K. loyalist paramilitaries said on Tuesday.